Evolving Your Online Business with a Membership Site

Some of you know I’m writing a Social Media Resource, but what many of you might not realize is that as much time as I spend writing it, I also have to spend planning how to sell it. The Internet has made it easy to share information and allows me to bypass publisher bureaucracy, and instead publish it on my own.

But with all the good things, writers like myself are assaulted with problems like torrents and password sharing. With all of these issues how do you create a business plan that minimizes the losses?

Aaron Wall of SEOBook wrote about how Google’s suggested search does not block out suggestions with the word torrent in them. Because of this, people that wouldn’t normally think to torrent things, may begin to. Now he has a problem of his book being circulated without his just compensation. To counteract this problem, recently, a lot of publishers have switched to a membership style for selling their information.

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A membership style site means the user pays either a one time fee or a monthly fee to access the site. The nice thing about this business model is that you can keep adding information to your “book” and the user will always the most updated version. You can also add tools and interactive pages you wouldn’t normally to a pdf.

A site like this also opens up the possibility for other monetization methods. Since users that have bought your membership have to keep coming back to your site for the information, you have a welcome community to launch other products too. Also, you can create an affiliate program for registers users only, and since you run it yourself, you don’t pay the fees other third party affiliate sites charge.

My Social Media resource will be released as a membership site because I like the idea of adding new tools and information. How do you think torrents will effect ebook? Do you foresee more people opting to create membership sites instead of releasing paid ebooks?